dancing in the womb and its poetic of becoming: Susie Campbell on Rezia Wahid

As I walk into the dancing in the womb exhibition (currently at Crafts Study Centre Farnham until May 13, 2023) my visitor’s gaze is drawn immediately by the exquisite, translucent cloths suspended from fine wires, but then is gently redirected by them to the invisible spaces they sculpt between their drapes. The light, air and shadows of the gallery blend with the hanging cloths, seemingly caught at the very moment of turning into something material, impossibly transforming into delicate pieces of fabric.  I realise that I need to ‘look’ differently: to hold the presences and absences of this exhibition simultaneously, and to enjoy the way it plays at the edges of the material and the immaterial.  And I realise I am being invited to engage with a sophisticated and compelling poetic. When I turn to the book of the exhibition, this subtle poetic re-emerges within the text itself.

Rezia Wahid MBE is an award winning contemporary British artist, poet, and weaver.  She draws on a diverse range of English, Bangladeshi, Japanese and other international influences to create fluid, deceptively minimalist, woven pieces of art which can be ‘read’ both as important textile pieces within an international art tradition, and as avant-garde visual poetry. Her work has inspired many other artists, poets, and scholars to write about it, most recently in the important volume Weaving Light: writers and poets on the woven art of Rezia Wahid MBE, edited by Khaled Nurul Hakim, and also published by Hesterglock Press (2022). But dancing in the womb, which is both exhibition and accompanying artist’s book, allows Wahid’s own voice to be heard directly. Moreover, it allows her poetic to emerge across a combination of textile and text-based art. 

The exhibition showcases six long cloths, woven using a translucent silk yarn and hand-dyed yarns of lilac, blue, green and red. Wahid draws on a traditional Bangladeshi technique known as jamdani or ‘extra weft’, but where historically this was used to make geometric patterns, she uses it to create patterns of a delicate tracery, fluid but also quite graphic or writing-like. Wahid has written and spoken powerfully about the importance of drawing on her own experiences of pregnancy and motherhood in the making of these pieces, but this does not result in a figurative approach but in work that is abstract, contemplative, and profound.

While I am in the exhibition, I take a closer look at the cloth suspended nearest to me and am drawn to its subtle progression of coloured threads moving - like lines of writing - across the fine surface of the cloth. But unlike writing, which has a definite start and finish point, theses threads emerge from and blend back into the transparent silk background which itself frays into a fine fringe at each end. And it is in this fray that I start to comprehend Wahid’s poetic. These frayed threads mark a threshold of becoming and non-becoming, a border where I seem to encounter that moment of materialisation which struck me on entering the exhibition. It is in this space of frayed threads that the cloth moves into and out of its own being; it is the place where the work moves past its own ending, returning to individual threads, and it is also simultaneously the work’s starting point: a fringe of separate threads which are drawn into the weave which materialises the cloth. And this poetic, which starts with the fringe, is amplified by the delicacy and translucence of the cloth itself as it interacts with the light and shadows around it, and by the patterns of coloured thread which draw the eye back and forth across a textured background. This visual rhythm of the cloth continues to foreground its own making: a back and forth of weft across warp. 

Textile artist, scholar and philosopher Catherine Dormor is also compelled by the edges of Wahid’s woven cloths. In her essay ‘Centre-Edge’ (included in Weaving Light) she wonders if the edge of cloth is an ending or a beginning, and concludes it is both simultaneously. It is, she suggests, ‘a space for cloth’s becoming’ (Weaving Light, p. 29). By fraying the edge, this space for becoming is teased out even further by Wahid and allows us to see the cloth emerge at the very moment of its making. A moment which draws us into meditations on materialisation as well as on generation (including pregnancy) and mortality.  A dancing in the womb. 

And this is a poetic which is carried over into Wahid’s artist’s book of the exhibition. The visual beauty of this book is enough to stop me in my tracks. Part of me wants to do no more than luxuriate in Paul Tucker’s stunning photographs of Wahid’s work and in the lyrical rhythms of much of the writing that accompanies them. But there is more here than beauty: Wahid’s poetic of becoming continues into the text itself. Of course, this is partly because the airy dynamics of the cloths are brought into the book directly through the photographs, but it is also because the concern with making, so subtly structured into the woven cloths, seems to impact on the whole text. Many of the photographs are of the weaver at work, close-ups of her at the loom, threading up the warp or tentering the cloth. Photographs of the finished collection are contextualised by images of hard work and preparation. Many of the images include lively shots of Wahid’s children and the whole background of the studio within which the weaving takes place. The book foregrounds the making, the processes and physicality of a woven artform and contextualises it within what is the reality for many women artists’ working practice, juggling the making of art with having and rearing children. Furthermore, Wahid’s own text is presented in dialogue not just with these images, but also with essays she commissioned from other commentators. Rather than presenting a definitive written artist’s statement, she showcases a dialogue, woven back and forth between her own introductory notes and the commentary of others. The text comes into being in the interweave of these different voices. Within this, Wahid’s own voice is distinctive and compelling, articulating those moments in her making process when the artwork comes into being and is actually achieved. Talking about different densities in her warp yarns, for example, she suggests that it is this matrix which ‘enables me to achieve light and air to travel through. Natural light and the divine aspect of light which manifests around and within became essential to achieve’ (dancing in the womb, p.101). This is exactly what I experienced on entering the exhibition.  
The subtlety and sophistication of Wahid’s woven pieces, and the combination of a modernist aesthetic with her interest in recovering important traditional weaving techniques, invite comparison with great textile-artist and innovator Anni Albers. In my conversations with Wahid, her regard for the courage and vision of Albers as a significant predecessor is apparent. One of the most significant ways in which Wahid’s work resonates with Albers’ is in their shared interest in a writing practice which extends across text and textile. And perhaps underlying both Wahid’s and Albers’ work as innovative women artists is the context illuminated by Kathryn Sullivan Kruger in Weaving the Word (Susquehanna University Press, 2001), in which she argues that there are important historical and cultural links between traditional textile making and women’s textual production. She reminds us ‘By participating in the production of textiles – as well as the community that existed because of that production – women took part in the first textual practices, recording their society’s stories, myths and sacred beliefs in symbols woven or embroidered on their textiles’ (Kruger, p.22). A writing practice that extends across text and textile is thus rooted in what was traditionally a woman’s textual production practice. It is fitting, then, that Wahid’s poetic of becoming, which engages so profoundly with making and materialisation, includes within it gestures towards pregnancy and motherhood, brilliantly subverting such binaries as art versus craft or public versus private and insisting on the seriousness of a text and textile art which draws on the personal, the embodied and the affective, as well as on more abstract conceptual, artistic and intellectual traditions.